On the other side of the aisle, California governor Gavin Newsom did the right thing early by discouraging large gatherings - except at Disneyland (LOL). You can’t make this shit up. Disney literally wanted to continue business as usual.

As the title of this newsletter and its entire point indicates, what I am interested in is in the absence of epistemological authorities, what do we do? I’ve been writing this newsletter for two years about how the confluence of government power and expert authority destroys the ability to know real things about the territory of physiology, because the tools used by authorities are meant for shaping markets of rent extraction, not for actually helping people. The cures and treatments are a side effect of the main point.

It seems this thesis has been thrust into criticality by Covid-19 and SARS-CoV-2 - so what now?

What is the anti-statist’s response to a global pandemic? How can you ensure security and safety without borders, authoritarian control, mandatory quarantines, and surveillance tech?

They follow contacts and test liberally. They made an app available to track infections, and only expose patient data when an infection has been confirmed, rather than opportunistically use the crisis to build permanent surveillance infrastructure to threaten civil liberties in perpetuity (e.g. the Patriot Act).

Less than 1% of their tests are positive, which reflects how many tests they are doing. They sequester people who test positive in hospitals. Those people do not go home, because community transmission seems to be a key feature to intervene in to flatten the curve.

In Singapore, once you are confirmed positive, if you have no symptoms you can be sent home, but you are kept under strict home quarantine. A government SMS system texts you every day and requires a check-in to confirm your location - penalties are harsh.

Singapore did not enter mass lockdown based on fear. They made testing widely available, and enforced quarantine rules that made sense for their population, and “normal life” is mostly continuing their with contained spread.

Here’s the problem - I don’t for a second trust Anglo / Western governments to wield this power in the same way, nor do I think Singapore’s penal state approach is good. At the end of the day, this leads to the cops knocking on your door and putting you into a jail cell or worse to enforce the rules. The edge cases are really, really bad, but something must also be done. What is to be done?

The New England Complexity Science Institute has put together EndCoronaVirus.org. It’s full of amazing resources for everyone, evidence-based answers for just about everything one can find about SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19, and can be a great resource for all community members, families, pharmacy workers, grocery store workers, and more.

Check out the sheet linked above, and if you don’t have a mask, realize that there are other options. This is not a blanket recommendation to turn anything into a mask - it’s a suggestion that perhaps “authorities” cannot anticipate every wrinkle in their own epistemology, and you can perhaps take some more agency in ensuring you and yours are protected at least minimally, in these times of institutional failure.

People and 3-D Printing Rise to the Occasion when the Supply Chain Fails

This hospital was reluctant to break IP, but the extraordinary situation makes it clear to everyone involved: IP literally kills people. When this crisis goes away, we will have plenty of 3-d printers, and PLENTY of COPD patients, lung transplant patients, people who need ventilators. Will we wait for the captured markets of capitalism to create the necessary 10-15% profit margin to deliver these products to those who need them in the developing world, or will we do something about it?

I’ve talked them up quite a bit in this newsletter, but they are always worth a mention.

Tarek Loubani and his team are working on open-source face shields (not face masks) that can be produced with cheaply available plastic material typically used for PPE. If you are interested in his project, check out their Patreon here, or go to their website and check out the 3-d printing file repos and get involved. If you have a skill relevant to Glia and want Tarek’s contact info, feel free to reach out to me directly, he has given me permission to share his WhatsApp details.

Nutritional, Supplemental, and Pharmaceutical Interventions

This newsletter wouldn’t be complete without a quick study of Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, and potential freely or cheaply available interventions that anyone can use.

Unfortunately, it’s not ready yet! But rest assured, I and a small group of medical students, physiologists, and MDs are working on a project we will rapidly open-source when it’s ready. We are focusing on measuring effect sizes and harm, and making sure we put something that is safe, and at worst harmless. SARS-CoV-2 is very new, but there are plenty of interventions already tested for it.

At a high level, we’ll talk about the following:

Things that make it hard for the virus to replicate

Zinc

Things that bolster lymphopenia (lymphopenia levels track well with course of disease currently)

Garlic (allicin)

Things that increase nitric oxide (NO) (interferon signaling can potentially increase the risk of cytokine storm, NO signaling could be a good alternative)

L-citrulline

Things that increase T cell, CD4, CD8+

Vitamin B6

Selenium

Things that bind 5-HT2A and 5-HT2C to prevent inflammatory cascades in the lungs

Cinanserin

There’s a lot more detail here, and a LOT more careful, diligent work to do before we share anything even coming close to a recommendation. None of this is a recommendation.